Bureaucracy: A Rant

Why is it so damn hard for the UAA financial aid office to change its official record of my email address? You wouldn't think this would be rocket science, right? I mean, I can go online and update my own phone number and address...but not my email address. Craziness, right? Especially since email is the university's primary means of contacting me. I mean, when's the last time financial aid gave me a phone call? Oh, that's right, NEVER.

Financial aid DOES, however, email me information about my financial aid stuff. Often. And they send my emails to my UWEC email address, which will expire any day now. (Of course, I've thought that since October, since that's when UWEC claims to cut us off.) I figured, Hey, financial aid is important. I should probably update that so they have the right email and I'm not left in the dark about some missing paperwork that got filed in the wrong drawer or something. (Because it happens. It happened to me last semester. It took FOREVER for me to get my check. September was a pretty lean month, let me tell you.)

Well. I went to the financial aid office and told them about my problem. I was promptly chastised for not using my UAA email address in the first place. I tried to explain that back when I began all of this financial aid business, I didn't even HAVE a UAA address yet because I wasn't officially enrolled at UAA; I had simply been "recommended for admission by the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts." I didn't officially get accepted -- that is, the papers weren't filed -- until July, too late to do a FAFSA and apply for loans and such. Oh. Well, finally the financial aid guy got around to telling me that he couldn't help me. He sent me over to registration.

Registration told me that they already HAD my UAA email in the computer. I explained that I got THEIR emails, it was the FINANCIAL AID emails that were the problem. After putzing with the computer for twenty minutes, making me miss my shuttle back to campus -- because all of these offices are in a MALL that is NOT within walking distance of campus, a stroke of brilliance, let me tell you -- the lady finally told me that she couldn't help me, and sent me over to ENROLLMENT.

The enrollment guy didn't know what to do, because all of THEIR stuff was going to my UAA email as well. He called over a financial aid guy -- not the one who yelled at me in the beginning -- who said that he didn't know what to do either. Christ. It's an email address. It shouldn't be this damn hard.

So...together,Mr. Financial Aid and Mr. Enrollment filled out some paperwork for a miracle lady who supposedly knows everything. (I bet.) I'm guessing that I'll never get a financial aid email at my UAA address. Ever. It's just too hard. Everybody is trained for their specific little job, and nobody has a big picture of how the machine works. So when some little kink comes up -- like some girl who filled out her financial aid papers prior to having an official UAA email address -- everyone panics and tries to hand off responsibility to someone else.

It's frustrating. Especially because this should be SIMPLE. Why the hell I can't just do it online, the way that I can change ANY OTHER ASPECT OF MY PERSONAL INFORMATION, is beyond me. I just don't understand.